Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (29 page)

Dr. Majidi’s office functioned with considerable strictness. You were expected to pay in full for sessions canceled even well in advance, and if you showed up late more than twice, you were stricken from his client list altogether. (This severity did not preclude him from canceling appointments himself the day of the World Cup finals.) He shared his office suite with a psychiatrist, to whom he dispatched his incurable patients for prescriptions of Prozac, and the joint waiting room was usually so full that some clients had to sit in the stairwell. Often we waited an hour or more before being ushered into his office, which was painted in cheery buttercup yellow and decorated with photos of Persepolis. During our first few sessions, Dr. Majidi did more than his share of talking. We learned that he was divorced, had a teenage son with his second wife, and was torn over whether to
move his family to Laguna Beach. This decision seemed to weigh so heavily on his consciousness that it, rather than our wedding dilemmas, dominated our sessions.

“On the one hand, I think, here we’re surrounded by family. My son has an exceptional network of support. And to be honest with you, I don’t look forward to the idea of transplanting myself professionally at this stage in my life. But then I think, I have brought a child into this world, and I’m responsible for his education. I just don’t know if I could live with myself, putting him through Iranian schools. And Ahmadinejad. Who saw that coming?”

“We moved to Germany when I was fourteen,” Arash ventured. “It was really difficult, but we managed. I went to university, everyone adjusted.”

“Really? Interesting!” Dr. Majidi paused to sip tea, then began again. “You know what I think? I think, as a first step, my wife and I need to stop talking about our plans at dinner parties. You know how Iranians are—everyone needs to air their opinion and interfere in your decision. And of course it has nothing to do with what you are actually contemplating, but their own issues. If
they
can’t leave, then you’re a fool to consider it; if they can, then you’re already a decade too late. … Well, time’s up! See you next week.”

“What do you think it means that our therapist only talks about himself?” I wondered, as we bought fresh
barbari
across the street. It was past eight when we emerged from Dr. Majidi’s, and we sat on the street tearing off chunks of bread and discussing our session. “Maybe it’s because he thinks we’re really healthy and can work out all our problems on our own. Did you get a look at that mother and daughter in the waiting room?”

The pair had embodied the most extreme generational clash, the mother in über-chador, the kind with attachable sleevelets (used to keep the wrists and forearms covered, in case the chador and the manteau beneath it slipped back a couple inches), the daughter in a tight tunic, patterned tights, and sexy lace-up boots. Compared to such patients, perhaps our wedding stress struck Dr. Majidi as prosaic and undeserving of clinical attention. He would need to correct that attitude if he wanted to practice in Laguna Beach.

We decided to give him another chance, because it seemed unfair to judge him on our very first meeting. By our third session, Dr. Majidi seemed to have resolved his personal travails. He actually listened when I told him about my mother’s opposition to the timing of our marriage, and volunteered some insight about how emigration adds strain to the natural tensions between parents and children. He warned us of the pitfalls of intercultural marriages, suggesting that just because we had a love of baklava and Rumi in common, we should not assume our attitudes about everything else were the same. We had already understood this and didn’t particularly need such counsel, but Dr. Majidi seemed to mean well and we listened politely. As our very next visit drew to a close, he rubbed a hand against his broad stomach and cleared his throat. “It has been a real privilege working with the two of you, but sadly I won’t be available after the end of the month. I’m flying to Los Angeles to enroll my son in school, and the family will join me shortly after. It kills me to leave, really it does. I know I’ll never have a more comfortable life anywhere. But this country is sinking, and I owe it to my son to offer him something better.”

“Is it really sinking?” I asked. “I mean, more than usual?” It was the early summer of 2006, and President Ahmadinejad’s performance in office, though worrisome at moments, did not strike most people as dramatically worse than the typical clerical rule they were used to. Three times he had called for Israel to be wiped off the map, but to most Iranians, accustomed to hearing exaggerated rhetoric from their leaders and seeing its equivalent on murals around the city, this did not seem especially noteworthy. The most controversial aspect of his rule, his rash economic policy, was just starting to attract attention. Keen to bolster his popularity in the provinces, the president was constantly commissioning major infrastructure projects around Iran that injected vast amounts of cash into the economy. Economists warned of an inevitable spike in inflation. The Tehran stock exchange had seen a 26 percent decrease in its index, and fifty prominent economists had just published an open letter accusing the president of unsettling the investment climate and squandering oil revenue. But with parliament opposed to many of these policies, especially the raiding of the country’s oil funds, it seemed plausible that Ahmadinejad would
be forced to reconsider his positions. “It’s all a matter of perspective,” Dr. Majidi replied blandly, perhaps regretting his blunt word choice—after all, he was advising two people who were just beginning to build a life in the “sinking” country.

On the way home, we decided it was impossible to know Dr. Majidi’s real motivations for leaving. In truth, we couldn’t help feeling a twinge of unease at this departure. When your therapist, someone who is trained in identifying what is destructive in life, concludes that the society you live in is best left behind, it gives you particular pause. We concluded that Dr. Majidi was better off leaving, as he had become determined to see only gloom in his surroundings, and with that attitude he would inevitably create only a gloomy reality for himself. Had he been privy to our conversation, he would likely have pointed out that we were rationalizing. And perhaps we were. But we were not the only ones in Iran choosing to focus on what seemed promising. In fairness, much was happening to encourage such optimism. Most Iranians admired Ahmadinejad’s firm position on the country’s right to peaceful nuclear power, and believed he was serving Iran well by guaranteeing its future access to an alternative source of energy. The government argued that by building nuclear reactors, Iran could free up oil and its byproducts for export and thus bring significant income into the lumbering economy. If the president managed to negotiate a solution by which Iran retained this right without alienating the world, everyone stood to gain.

Two nights after our last meeting with Dr. Majidi, our families gathered at a middle-of-the-week dinner party at my uncle’s house. He and my aunt had invited Arash’s parents over so we could discuss the final details of the wedding, just a couple of weeks away. The air was gentle and warm, and we ate outside on the terrace, a casual summer meal of
kotlet
—patties of lamb and potato—and garlicky homemade pickles. Our families seemed to truly enjoy each other’s company, laughing easily and considering a vacation together. The women talked about music, the men traded thoughts on business, and we all conferred excitedly about the day’s news: President Ahmadinejad had waived the ban on women’s attendance at soccer games. It
was a truly astonishing act for an avowedly fundamentalist president who had until then scarcely acknowledged that women have rights.

The ban dated back to the revolution, when doctrinaire mullahs deemed the raucous atmosphere of a football stadium polluting to women. The episode during Khatami’s presidency when women fans had successfully stormed a stadium one day had failed to change the authorities’ position. Their precise reasoning was difficult to deduce. The regime objected to women watching the male players in their shorts, but since the games were broadcast live on national television, it hardly made sense to ban women from watching in public what they could view in their living rooms. The immense crowds at football matches also made gender segregation virtually impossible. For a regime that took coed mingling very seriously (lawmakers were now insisting that classes for girls and boys should be held not only in separate buildings, but in buildings a certain number of meters distant) it was easier to forbid women from attending altogether. But, as an activist I had spoken with earlier that day had pointed out, “unmarried men and women sit together in dark cinemas, which if you think about it is a lot worse.”

“He’s clearly trying to extend his popularity to the educated middle class,” I said. Since state radio announced the news early that day, I had been talking to analysts and women’s rights activists, and everyone agreed that the president’s intentions were purely political. He would reap popularity points by positioning himself as a leader who risked a fight with the ayatollahs of Qom, the country’s holy city, to win women their right to watch football.

For the most part, Ahmadinejad still drew the core of his support from a tiny fraction of diehard ideologues and from among the employed poor—minor civil servants and the lower ranks of the Basij and the military, people who found themselves benefiting from his expansionist economic policies. There was no reason to think the base of his support had grown significantly since the first round of the 2005 elections, when he received only 5.7 million votes, just 12 percent of the electorate (most Iranian analysts judged the number of his core supporters on the basis of the first round, before the Basij mobilized
voters in the second). Compared with the nearly 22 million votes Khatami won in 2001, Ahmadinejad’s constituency amounted to a small minority. But with a radical gamble like this, he could attract women and the educated urban class, the millions who had voted for Khatami and either boycotted the most recent election or supported Rafsanjani. Neither of those two presidents, far more moderate than Ahmadinejad, had dared such a bold policy reversal.

“Isn’t it always the most conservative leaders who can take these kinds of decisions?” said Arash. “Because they’re accepted by the hard-line establishment, they have room to maneuver in ways the liberals never do.” Everyone offered their favorite examples of this phenomenon: the Israeli leader Ariel Sharon pulling out of Gaza; Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and his peace initiative for ending the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“The timing is very clever,” mused Mahmoud Agha, Arash’s father. He reached for his glass, his bearing dignified as usual, an intrigued expression in his gold-specked brown eyes. Earlier that month, the nuclear crisis between Iran and the West had escalated considerably. The regime was digging in its heels over the right to enrich uranium, and Ahmadinejad was the defiant articulator of this tough line. The policy risked further international isolation, something Iranians had experienced quite enough of, and thus it demanded public support as never before. By taking today’s bold step, the president could harness both secular ambitions and soccer patriotism to his own brand of religious nationalism. It seemed some critics were won over.

“I don’t know exactly why he did this,” my uncle Shahrokh said, “but perhaps we have another Reza Shah on our hands.” Might Ahmadinejad be such a ferociously ambitious leader, willing to provoke the religious establishment for the sake of improving the nation? To me, the extent of his ambition seemed clear, but its true character still impossible to judge.

An important realignment was taking place in Iran’s domestic poli tics and in the country’s place in the world. Feeling newly emboldened in its confrontation with the West, a conservative administration was astutely reaching out to the vast, moderate spectrum of Iranian society to build support for its antagonistic foreign policy. This meant the depressing,
dead-end dynamic of Iranian politics during the last decade—moderates attempting reform, only to be blocked by hard-liners—was finally being recast. Not since the earliest days of the Khatami tenure, back in 2000, had significant change seemed even remotely possible. The outcome was still very far from certain, and domestic openness for the sake of a belligerent posture in the world hardly constituted a desirable way forward. But if you looked at this from the point of view of an Iranian—accustomed to domestic repression as well as a government that misbehaved around the world—it was still progress. For the first time in as long as I could remember, the somber sense of living in an irretrievably failed society lifted, and the future seemed specked with, of all things, opportunity.

O
ne weekday evening, just days after Ahmadinejad’s astounding announcement, Arash prodded me into joining him and Houshang for an evening with a classical musician. Since I didn’t know very much about Iranian classical music, its history, or its place in Iranian culture, I realized only much later the importance of the man we were going to meet: Ostad Mohammad Reza Lotfi, Iran’s most accomplished classical musician and
tar
master. Arash played two classical instruments, the
tar
and the
setar,
and had been enamored of Iranian music since his adolescence. My appreciation for the music had grown since we met, and I was especially interested in how it intersected with Sufism and the poetry of Rumi.

“Isn’t it a rather oddly timed return?” I asked, as we crawled through traffic. Lotfi had spent long years in exile in the West, and had just returned to re-found the school of music the authorities shut down after the 1979 revolution. Houshang had visited the school the previous day, and reported that hordes of eager young musicians had stood in interminable lines under the hot Tehran sun, instrument cases tucked under their arms, waiting to take the entrance exam. Enough women showed up for an all-women’s orchestra. Arash explained that Iranian classical music is an oral tradition, and that with most of the great masters in exile, this young generation had entirely missed the opportunity for formal training.